Douglas student activists subjected to online bullying
Facebook users have told Rebecca Boldrick, mother of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School student David Hogg, that she should have aborted her son.
Emma Gonzalez, the 18-year-old Stoneman Douglas senior who has become famous for calling BS on politicians who oppose gun reform, was called a “lesbian skinhead” on Twitter last week by a Maine politician. (He has since apologized.)
And when Ryan Deitsch, also 18 and a Stoneman Douglas senior, tweeted a picture of himself dressed as David Bowie, a stranger called him a “striped retard.”
Deitsch, whose red hair made him instantly recognizable when he peppered U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, RFla., with questions during a live town hall on CNN, said he doesn’t let the detractors get to him. He sees more support than hate in the digital universe, he said.
“I’m a ‘pussy’ and a ‘snowflake,’ ” he said with a laugh last week. “That was just this morning.”
Social media gave these students the tools to show the world the terror and panic inside the walls of Stoneman Douglas High School during the shooting that killed 17 students and faculty on Feb. 14. Since then, these survivors have used social media to spin their pain and outrage into a national movement, the likes of which hasn’t been seen in decades.
A core group of students became instantly famous, and many of them are now followed and retweeted by global superstars such as comedienne Sarah Silverman, Boca Raton-born singer Ariana Grande and Andy Richter, Conan O’Brien’s sidekick on TBS’ late-night show “Conan.”
They’ve also experienced the dark side of digital fame. Even social media posts not meant to be pro or con anything — e.g., mundane greetings between friends — receive responses from online trolls.
Hogg, 17, says he likes “to respond to them to shut down the conspiracies, but also just cause it’s fun … because they’re so stupid.”
But he sees such attacks as symptomatic of a larger problem.
“It just shows me how divided we are as a country, and it makes me sad to think about how little faith these people have in America and how much they’ve lost faith in it,” Hogg said. “It’s really depressing and sad, because they’re dividing us. They’re making us weaker as Americans.”
Emma Gonzalez said she refuses to acknowledge or respond to the Maine politician’s insult.
But Deitsch, like Hogg, said he tries to engage those people detracting from his gun-control message, which aims to get semiautomatic guns off the streets and to keep guns out of the hands of the mentally ill.
“If you disagree with anything my colleagues or I stand for, then please, by all means, educate me on your position. I strive to have not a strong position but an informed position,” Deitsch wrote in a tweet he pinned on March 6.
So far, he has yet to be swayed from his position.
“There are people who could have a good argument [against gun control], but I have yet to see it,” Deitsch said.
Some of the kids do their own version of trolling. Student Sarah Chadwick edited herself into a National Rifle Association public service announcement telling the gun rights group their time was running out — a riff on NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch’s warning that “time’s running out” for a number of other groups, including the “lying media, every Hollywood phony, to the role model athletes who use their free speech to alter and undermine what our flag represents.”
Cameron Kasky, 17, another member of the core group, said he doesn’t take the trolling seriously, and even finds it funny. The best hate mail goes up on the wall in the group’s headquarters, he said. And he’s found out how easy it is for preshooting posts to get misconstrued.
“They will take something [posted] from when I was a misguided 15-, 16-, and 14-year-old and will hold that up like I am a politician in office,” he said with a chuckle.
Deitsch insists the digital communications pale next to face-to-face encounters.
“It doesn’t really matter how much you are tweeted at,” he said. “These men and women and children who have been coming up to us, that’s what’s really inspired me.”